Wizalry! Chivalry Devs Show Off Mirage: Arcane Warfare

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When Chivalry developers Torn Banner Studios announced their next game, Mirage: Arcane Warfare [official site], I said the teaser trailer made it look like Chivalry with wizards – Wizalry. And it still does. A new trailer shows off first-person melee combat like Chivalry and magic spells like wot wizards do but… how well do these two come together? See what you make of it yourself:

Chivalry has grand first-person melee action, right, so Torn Banner know what do with that. But what happens to careful strikes and defending when a wizard can e.g. summon a giant magical spiked ball and hurl it at you? Maybe there’s a magical equivalent of careful offense and defence. Maybe magic comes with big risks of its own. What the heck do I know? I’m just some idiot who’s watched the same videos as you. Without clear, uncut gameplay footage, it’s hard to get a sense of how it plays.

“Our last game Chivalry was about chopping off people’s heads with a sword. Mirage takes that core gameplay DNA and explodes with a range of new bloody, brutal combat possibilities thanks to the addition of powerful magic” Torn Banner’s CEO Steve Piggott said in an announcement today. “Mixing in the elements of fantasy and magic allow us to add entirely new components and levels of complexity to that core team-based combat concept that we find so much fun to play.”

Heh, that was a fun mod. I remember playing it at a LAN with friends for the first time, and one of us discovering that you could turn into a bear. Then hearing the panicked yelling from the other room about being chased by a bear.

After playing Lichdom for a few hours, I really need magic to be more than a damage dealer for it to be remotely interesting. Nothing bores me more than magic spells that might as well be a gun in Unreal Tournament. I can’t tell from the video what to expect from Mirage, but I hope there’s tricks and traps in the library.

Love Chivalry to bits and spent 100s of hours on it, but I wish they’d get the Unreal source, or if they have it already, hire a programmer to do some proper work/optimisation on it instead of dicking about with hats, re-skins and UI changes.